What if the person you love

Was not and never will be good enough?

What if nobody will complete you?

What if nobody will ever love you

As much as their own hand?

As much as shopping?

As much as sleeping in?

They hold you and never feel warm

They don’t get the poetry you wrote

They laugh, but they might be faking it

Do they love who you are, or what you are?

Are you together because you want to be or because you have to be?

They say you shouldn’t be alone yet you learnt to enjoy solitude

You ask somebody to watch a movie with you

You watch it, you talk in the hope that you have similar interests

Even if you agree on everything, they will never understand you

They just get used to you

You become a habit

So do they

Like the endless perpetuation of the human race

More people do not make the world more complete

You both feel empty

So you fill yourselves with children

Who are empty too

You can’t fill a hole with holes

They take your money

They give you something to boast about to childless strangers

Unless they die

Then you have to say they were everything

And that you are nothing without them

But you are nothing, even with them

Both of you are

Nothing is ever good enough

Especially not you

I tried laughing the other day

Ended up coughing, hold the applause

Push them around, that migrant janitor, that grinning Mohammed

Breathe in recycled air in a plastic box

Lit like eternal midday

A confirmed miracle, bruised and purpled, swollen like a bee sting

We ran out of zip-lock bags, but we always had more bodies

So we built more walls to keep out the poor

A mother screamed as her son was scraped along the floor

An obese idiot laughed, bloated and asymmetrical

They’ll take you to the morgue with helicopters

To the comedy hospital with elephant tranquillisers

And surplus chromosomes

Now an obscene shadow, intrusive like a noise

You cannot block out rancid youthful succour

For a placid death larynx clogged with drool

That real grinning winner in a real smart suit

Paediatric gynaecologist

Professional as hell

Looking good in that suit no matter how hard you shut your eyes

I’ll always see that image in a titillating light

Even if you censor it, it’s still negatively there

Suture those peepers, impetuous priest

Anorexic arms

Bulimic teeth

Be less than nothing, be less than me

In the year of Our Lord

Witness the aborted birth of Being flushed down the toilet

Nobody ever noticed that it was God who was

Flushed down the great underground urethra

Into the saline womb of the sea

Like a butterfly tangled in a web

Like a bear being drained of bile in his cage

Like a dog being choked by her master’s chain

Like the neighbour’s cat being drowned in a lake

Like a nameless corpse being washed up on the shore

Like too many similes and too many metaphors

Like a real grinning winner

Like a pregnancy scare

Like pigs fed to pigs fed to pigs fed to pigs

Like being injected with air

Like all those stuffed ponies your little sister kept

Like falling asleep on your child’s deathbed

Like committing suicide by becoming a concept

Like carving a god-shaped hole in the middle of your chest

Like a planned extinction of me and me alone

Like finding bones on the shelves of your family home

Like a total blackout on the will to power

Like all your teeth falling out in the shower

Nothing will ever spare you from the void except the void itself